Slashdot Mirror

According to the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, the US has a little more than 7,000 warheads. Russia has roughly 6,000 warheads.

The US is also probably a decade or two away from a real arms race with China. I see incentive there for maintaining the level of nuclear weapons. More likely, the US will upgrade its nuclear arsenal to more precise lower-yield weapons since these would be more in line with the tactics of the rest of the military.

According to the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, the US has a little more than 7,000 warheads. Russia has roughly 6,000 warheads.

The US is also probably a decade or two away from a real arms race with China. I see incentive there for maintaining the level of nuclear weapons. More likely, the US will upgrade its nuclear arsenal to more precise lower-yield weapons since these would be more in line with the tactics of the rest of the military.

According to the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, the US has a little more than 7,000 warheads. Russia has roughly 6,000 warheads.

The US is also probably a decade or two away from a real arms race with China. I see incentive there for maintaining the level of nuclear weapons. More likely, the US will upgrade its nuclear arsenal to more precise lower-yield weapons since these would be more in line with the tactics of the rest of the military.

Here are some links:

UK. There're quite a few sites out there about facilities in the UK. Anyone remember a film (fiction) from the 80', called 'secret underground', or 'underground London', or some such?

Tokyo. Google +tokyo +underground +secret +"Shun Akiba" for more. Thanks for reminding me that i want to look into whether Mr. Akiba's book has been translated to english.

Moscow. Great article. Riveting stuff. Google +Moscow +underground +diggers "Vadim Mikhailov" for more. You might see a bunch of links to stories about the Moscow theatre hostage event (by Chechen extremists). Yes, Mr. Mikhailov showed the police how to approach the theatre basement from below.

Washington/US is much trickier, as there is a *lot* of foil-hat-type stuff out there. here's a good overview of some places.

As an rough estimate, with the Doomsday Clock as a reference, I humbly propose that the odds of a maniac killing us all are massively higher than the rogue asteroid issue.

Maybe we should be putting available cash towards world peace as a slightly higher priority.

Sun Tzu said that the best way to win is to disrupt your opponent's strategy.

If you buy the theory that current American military strategy is constant and sustained long-distance bombing (eg: hyperwar), then it stands to reason that the only way to defeat this is to get rid of the devices that help guide this tactic.

This needs to be done in orbit. There's probably going to be a cold-war style conflict up there, unless the American military can fuel this potential conflict into mass paranoia and use that to justify a pre-emptive strike on the Chinese. That'll be tricky with all of the Western nations out there trying to play nice with China trade-wise.

Here ya go, as of 3 years ago.

And here as of Jan '99.

http://www.bullatomsci.org/issues/nukenotes/mj00nu kenote.html
I feel a lot safer. No more MIRVs. In 2007. Maybe. We can still bomb ourselves to hell and back, but at least there will be only one warhead per missile, which reduces the payload of a missile from up to 3 megatons to laughable 300 kilotons. A few hundred of those shouldn't hurt too much. In order to avoid ruining the peaceful mood, I'll ignore that mininukes make terminal war more likely by filling the gap between conventional weapons and "won't-touch" "end-of-the-world" grade weapons, thus creating a path from conventional conflict to nuclear war.

Here's a link to the full text of the president's address to the UN. He mentions those tubes. Close enough?

And here's a link to a story from the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, who are anything but crackpots, explaining why those tubes are no kind of evidence at all.

Count the errors in parent by a known troll.

• Up to 12 levels of tunnels
• Nuclear bunkers
• Lots of human skulls
• Whole tribes of people living there
• Mass burial sites
• A hastily abandoned chemical laboratory
• A 3000-seat bunker under a cathedral
• Strange religious rites
• All kinds of other weird stuff

There's several references to it everywhere, here's another.

'Stainless steel batteries? ' I think not. More likely that they are plutonium or some other nuclear material, and the reason that no predictions are being made about where they will land is because NASA doesn't want to start a panic. As I understand it they are designed to burn up on re-entry to avoid ground level contamination (that says nothing of atmospheric contamination along the flight path). If they survive all the way to the ground and they are radiological....

Space Nuclear Power Systems

Space Nuclear Power System Accidents

Bulletin of Atomic Scientists: How many nuclear devices are there in space?

Link to CNN story.

I really don't understand why you use an argument like this. It's old and tired. Rah, rah, rah. We represent freedom and everything that's right with the world. Yada-yada-ya. Yes, I know that's the claim. The other guys are worse than us and all of that.

I assert that the reality is that we aren't that terribly different and that while the U.S. government is rigorous in it's defense of the freedoms of your average American, it really couldn't care less about anyone outside it's borders regardless of what the propaganda machine claims.

For instance, there are the bombings of Dresden and Hamburg (~175-200,000 dead), use of Atomic weapons against Hiroshima and Nagasaki (~350,000 dead), and significant loss of life for Iraqi children (~200-500,000 over 5-10 years).

Sadly, you point out that the U.S. formed it's policy against Saddam Hussein based, amongst other reasons, on their concern over the plight of the Kurds. This while they provide and continue to turn a blind eye to the large numbers of deaths of these exact same Kurds in Turkey (~40,000 dead). Note that the above listed numbers are predominantly civilian casualties. When other countries do this it's called terrorism. But the U.S. government does not engagement in this. Nor do any of it's "client" states. Like Turkey, of whom, 75% of their arsenal is supplied by the U.S. government. The arsenal used to kill these same Kurds. The U.S. government's desire to help the Kurds is clearly overwhelming in it's earnestness.

You are using typical apologist tactics for people unwilling to take any time to do a careful analysis of the actual facts or to use sources beyond those provided by the mainstream media. "We had to do it." "We're not as bad as the real bad guys."

How many people died crossing the Berlin wall? Was it any where near the roughly 1 million civilians (from above) that the U.S. has directly or indirectly killed? This isn't even a significant sampling of the number of civilian casualties the U.S. has at least some responsibility for.

Sort of, but at least in Arab countries, there's still a very pervasive and very effective propaganda machine. The percentage of the population that believes that the attacks of Sept 11 were orchestrated by Mossad (Israeli intelligence service), not by Muslim terrorists is pretty large.

Prove it.

He's not the one who started trolling, dude. Something about pots calling kettles black.

No, I'm just vehement. I'm very frustrated with people who just parrot the party line. I will avoid any further "trolls".

because he was opposed to the brutally repressive Iranian regime which was at the time just as bad and openly hostile to America and openly supporting international terrorism.

Right. The one we were also funding and arming during the Iran-Iraq war. Playing both sides against eachother essentially. See any of the Iran-Contra investigation information available on the web. Arms sales to Iran were occuring at the same time as arms sales to Iraq during the Iran-Iraq War (1980-1988).

Nicaragua is a good example. Democracy is taking hold there, after years of bloody Communist dictatorship.

The "bloody Communist dictatorship" doubled literacy, among other things. Also, they were in the process in 1985 of building a democratically elected government. Admittedly, very Sandinista biased at first, but it could have gone somewhere but for U.S. embargo, U.S. funding of the Contras (funded by arms shipments to Iran and drug money). Who knows? Do you? No.

Regardless, atrocities on both sides are well documented and there are not clear "winners" as far as any kind of moral conscience. You can't really prove that the Contras were any less "bloody" or that Democracy would never have been established.

As far as I know this was only the second use of weapons of mass destruction since the end of WWII (the other being Soviet gas attacks in Afghanistan). These were carried out against civilian targets and horribly effective. At this point the US began open opposition to Hussein's regime.

Well, I don't really understand why you use this argument. Dead is dead. I'm not really clear why it should matter what the mechanism is.

Are you aware that the total tonnage of bombs dropped on Vietnam is significantly larger than all of that dropped during WWII? That's not a Weapon of Mass Destruction?

The US tries to be a force for good. Sometimes we fail. Others not so much.

Regardless, you haven't really made any arguments that prove that the U.S. tries to be a force for good. Or, if we take your assumption that this is true and agree with you (for a moment), then we must also assume that the end justifies the means even when we kill more than we save by doing so.

I don't buy it. The use of force as a mechanism for solving problems (while effective in many ways) simply leads others (usually the ones on the receiving end) to the conclusion that opposing force is required in response.

A spiralling cycle of violence.

Ensuing power struggles.

In summary, I think it's pretty clear that U.S. government simply tries to maintain it's dominance and the reason it is not involved in conflicts like Myanmar (as you point out) is that there are no political (read: domination/power) reasons for it to do so. If it were so concerned about being a force for good it would be more concerned about Myanmar, East Timor, and the myriad of other examples where it essentially ignores suffering people because there is no perceived benefit.

Here's the data. (You do know how Google works, don't you?)

The largest nuclear weapon detonated was 50MT.

Mt. St. Helens released 24MT of energy.

Burt Rutan envisons a Space Tourism venture that works partly as a raffle. The company would create three new astronauts every week. One of those will have paid big money. The other two will have paid a reasonable $x,000 (it was $5000 in 1996).

The spacecraft has three seats. You can guarantee a seat by paying $100,000+ for a ticket. Otherwise you pay $5,000 for a chance. For a chance for a seat on each flight 10 people pay $5,000.

For each weekly flight all eleven go the training site in the Carribean. They are instructed in the three crew positions on the spacecraft. At the end of the fourth day of training the 10 candidates draw straws. Two of them get seats in the spacecraft. The other 8 have gotten a very nice Carribean vacation for $5,000.

The two and the $100,000 passenger get seats on the spacecraft launched on the Proteus for an Alan Shepard style 15 minute sub-orbital flight that lands in the same Carribean. The flight includes ten minutes of free weightlessness.

Rutan's vision was the commercial application of his entry for the X-Prize. The X-Prize competition is dormant because it never got a sponsor for the $1 Million prize.

And not for developing shitload of nukes to destroy Pakistan with. It sure sounds like the kind of thing perfect for nuclear simluations. Not that I'm fond of Pakistan's idea of leveling India with Nukes.

Braving the sanctions, C-DAC has built four versions of its Param series of machines, putting India in an elite club of supercomputing nations like the United States, Japan, Israel and China.

Oh wow, it's a who's who of nuclear powers. Considering that the US hasn't ruled out bombing the shit out of Afghanistan we're certianly in good company. The U.S. sanctions thing is bogus. They are close enough to Japan, France, Israel, &c to get all the shit they need.

And not for developing shitload of nukes to destroy Pakistan with. It sure sounds like the kind of thing perfect for nuclear simluations. Not that I'm fond of Pakistan's idea of leveling India with Nukes.

Braving the sanctions, C-DAC has built four versions of its Param series of machines, putting India in an elite club of supercomputing nations like the United States, Japan, Israel and China.

Oh wow, it's a who's who of nuclear powers. Considering that the US hasn't ruled out bombing the shit out of Afghanistan we're certianly in good company. The U.S. sanctions thing is bogus. They are close enough to Japan, France, Israel, &c to get all the shit they need.

The article forgets to mention one of the most stunning weapon in the intelligence world: suitcase nuclear bomb.



Finally, something makes Duke Nukem real!!!

I read the article just becase I don't like to reply without giving the benefit of the doubt.. but in this case it was a waste of time.

QUOTE: 'Things have simply stopped getting better, or worse, for our species.'
Then the Atomic Scientists wouldn't have a Doomsday Clock. And we wouldn't be worried about destroying our coastal cities with rising tides.

The article is only saved by Stringer who says the obvious, that 'Evolution goes on all the time. You don't have to intervene. It is just that it is highly unpredictable.'

I'd say that any mind that thinks evolution is over, is destined to become roadkill due to 'evolutionary' causes.

In our near future we have the prospect of mutations spreading which fight against aids, tropical diseases spreading north, and resistance to biowarefare or radiation. Somewhere along the way we will likely have changes in populations due to great artificial genes which can be passed on. Robotics and other technologies will enhance humans at some pace or another, there seems little doubt of that or you can read Hans Moravec if you are still unsure about that. We will have plenty of stresses on our populations and our genes, no worries about that. Homo Sap's going to have to advance a heck of a lot more for that.

The problem with a guy like Jones is that when people start to base strategies or policies on such delusions, we all lose out. Do you think we are losing no great artistic or scientific minds in the African tragedy of AIDS? Does it really matter if the makeup of populations change by one outliving the other, or being more procreative, or eating better, or what if they just ethnically cleanse, water war, bomb, poison, or otherwise do each other in? And are we all so homogenous now? I'd rather not consider myself as the least common denominator.

I think the battles of evolution require a lot of creative thinking to elucidate if you are thinking about your own time, and even then all bets are off. If anything evolution will accelerate as we become able to modify/improve our genes more quickly than the natural rate. And lots more people in the world will gain the means to exterminate those with genes they dislike. Finally, Natural Selection is always in operation. You can't turn it off just because increased mobility makes it difficult to measure.

Evolution is sort of like a saying of Buckaroo Banzai's: Just remember, wherever you go, there you are.

• Frankly, I doubt this claim. Can you substantiate it?

  Certainly, in the sense of giving you quotes from various sources, such as the well respected Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists [bullatomsci.org]. But probably you'll just dismiss it as biased, so what's the use? How many civillian causulties do *you* think occurred anyhow?

In fact, even the author of the article you cite expresses uncertainty about the numbers of civilian's killed.

The relavant paragraph in the article you cite seems to be:

• There have been no precise estimates of civilian casualties during the war. The most intelligent guesses have been broad ranging: "5,000 15,000 Iraqi civilians died during the war, and 4,000-6,000 civilians died since the end of the war due to wounds, lack of medical care, or malnutrition," according to Greenpeace. The bitter reality is that the numbers of civilians who die in the war's broadening wake will soon dwarf the number of Iraqis, Kurds, and other refugees who died in the civil strife after March 1. And the United Nations estimated in July that 50-80 thousand infants are at risk of severe malnutrition because of the war.

In addition, the article doesn't seem to differentiate between innocent civilians and those civilians who are part of various government ministries without holding military rank. I have to admit, though, that neither of us tried to pin the other down on any such distinction, so I can't really hold that against you. The article also doesn't make it clear exactly what catagories of civilian casualties (I'm assuming "casualties" is being used to talk about deaths, even though its proper definition also includes injuries that would keep one out of immediate combat) are includes in the 5,000 to 15,000. Does it include only those people who died directly as a result of military action by the allied forces? Does it include deaths that may have occurred even without the conflict, or deaths that occurred during the period of sactions before hostilities commenced?

There are certainly reasons to doubt this figure, but it should be noted that even the BOAS seemed to cite the figure for lack of anything better. And the article you cite is thought provoking, and stands a good chance of stiring up useful debate. It's worth reading.

• Some of the Mujahadin have joined the Taliban, but many more are with the Northern Alliance.

  All the more reason not to support the Northern Alliance. Bin Laden was once one of the Mujahadin himself. The US has a habit of supporting people like Noriega, Saddam Hussein, Bin Laden, that end up becoming the next enemy.

Adrian

Frankly, I doubt this claim. Can you substantiate it?

Certainly, in the sense of giving you quotes from various sources, such as the well respected Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists. But probably you'll just dismiss it as biased, so what's the use? How many civillian causulties do *you* think occurred anyhow?

Some of the Mujahadin have joined the Taliban, but many more are with the Northern Alliance.

All the more reason not to support the Northern Alliance. Bin Laden was once one of the Mujahadin himself. The US has a habit of supporting people like Noriega, Saddam Hussein, Bin Laden, that end up becoming the next enemy.

Regardless of the fact that the difficulty of destroying a sufficiently large meteor would be on par with killing all the cockroaches in Chicago with a spatula, missile defense in any incarnation is as practical as trying to stop traffic on the internet by targetting routers. Sure, you could hit a lot of them, in both cases, but the way the systems are structured, something will get through. Modern weapons have such high yields that one bomb, a one-percent margin of error, could result in 20 to 30 million deaths, depending on the weapon's objective. Two little things called redundancy and mutually-assured destruction. You don't have to take my word for it. You can go to the guy who [might have] built the thing. "Go back to bed America, your government is in control" -- George Bush pre

Any nation [...] can build a breeder reactor to make weapons-grade uranium.

If you don't have the first clue what you're blathering about, kindly shut the hell up.

I was thinking that if all the weapons plutonium were gathered it would be appropriate to create a clock set back to a minute after twelve o'clock to symbolize the beginning of a new era of hope.

Maybe it would be nice to have something like that some day.

But I think considering the important comment about the Warning Function, this clock should be set to the time the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists has set the Doomsday Clock when the center is built. The front cover of the current Bulletin says, "PLUTONIUM - WHO WANTS IT ?" Consider the symbol used for dangerous biological components, it is a much scarier looking version of the trefoil used for atomic energy. I would put the two hands of the doomsday clock, with a great brilliantly glowing crystal at the twelve o'clock digits mark above, at the entrance to this facility. From far away one would see only this brilliant light suspended in the air, and on approach one would see the dark clock hands, supported from a point on the ground that would be the center of the clock. One hand, the hour hand, rises vertically from that point and supports this crystal beacon. Branching off from the main clock hand pillar is the minute hand, set perhaps to nine minutes to midnight as the current clock reads.

Warning? Perhaps the light would warn off a plane coming in for a crash landing.. but more importantly, warn future generations about how close we came, why we sequestered plutonium, about the seduction of energy, and the hidden threat that anybody with Plutonium power can go nuclear in a short amount of time. Like Japan, which is a classic example of irresponsible leadership and a committment to the plutonium breeding cycle.

Perhaps heads of state could be required to visit this vault and shrine before taking their oaths of national security so that they personally understand the responsibility they have for forging and maintaining peace. Someone who "wants" Plutonium should have to walk through that door first.

I am not anti-energy. I am anti-horror. If we could link this sort of thing to the net and hyper-equipped locations around the world it would be nice. But we need a commanding icon which will send a message to everyone who sees it in person or in facsimile. Like the Doomsday Clock, or the rays of the nuclear half-life ticking away the centuries, the millenia.

I'm thinking this might be a good submission.

Do not forget the cosmonauts who were not sent into space but underwent some crazy inhuman experiments. In their race to win space, Russia lacked a bit of humanity. But who cares now ? They say that there is a price to progress. Reminds me of Guernica.

Seriously, maybe, just maybe the fact that there are millions of devout cultists (aka Mormons) in this state is the reason that everyone stays the hell away.

That's ad hominem, but I'll let it slide to make my point:

Some things they preach:

- The end of the world by fire and mass destruction is coming any day now! Really!

The Bulletin of Atomic Scientists has been saying the same thing for years. Who's more geeky than an atomic scientist?

- If you are a righteous Mormon you will become a GOD! With your own worlds and people, and creating billions of spritual children with your many wives in heaven! (yes, they do believe that you can have multiple wives in heaven!)

How many geeks consider themselves to be programming gods, whose glorious work will endure forever (aside from the geeks who left us the Y2K legacy to clean up, because clearly they weren't thinking long term)? Secondarily, how many modern westerners (including a large proportion of geeks) have multiple partners over the course of their lives? In what way is serial monogamy a superior morality to polygamy, if all parties concerned are consenting adults?

- Their temples, like the endowment cerimony, [sic] are straight from the occult! They used to swear on their LIVES! that they would never tell what happened in their cerimonies lest their tongue be cut out, their guts spilled and so on! Crazy stuff...

Apparently, someone didn't keep those vows, or you wouldn't know about that part of the ceremony. In any case, many religious and non-religious traditions include both explicit and implied consequences for failure to adhere to the standards of the group. Ask any soldier about the consequences of failure to abide by an oath to uphold principles. And, it should be noted, that only fully-informed adults who want to make a clear commitment to their faith are making these vows. Finally, as you noted, the part about tongues and guts is no longer a part of the ceremony.

and all sorts of other stuff. Having a majority of the population that beleives in things like this would be seriously discomforting to most people.

By definition, a majority of people believing these things would mean that only a minority of people would be discomfited. That logical fallacy aside, you are correct. Most people are uncomfortable with these ideas. Which is why members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints continue to be a minority except in places like Utah (outside of Salt Lake City), southeastern Idaho and northern Arizona.

Just incase anyone was wondering, here's a link to the doomsday clock http://www.bullatomsci.org/clock.html . I heard about it in third grade. Check it out if you ever want to know when to duck and cover.

How come almost every time there is a post about supersomputers, they are being used for nuclear bomb explosion simulations?

As usual, there's a good article over at The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists on why there's so much government desire for bomb simulation.

We have treaties and treaties on why we can't test these devices "for real". Given the desire to upgrade them without "upgrading" them in a way that affects counts or treaties, there's currently a lot of interest in how to re-use existing designs and components in ways that give functionally new weapons, without being listed as such. Converting air-burst devices to near-surface burst devices turns town-killers into bunker-killers, but it doesn't have to appear as building new weapons or changing the type of existing ones.

Check this year-old article. They've even got submarine-launched nuclear-capable missiles, which are quite useful for blackmail or a first strike.

I know that it's bad form to comment on spelling errors, but I had to chuckle at the incongruity of this one.

Getting back to the issue, the storage requirements you describe are for the firearms issued to Swiss citizens by the government as part of their militia/military service, not for firearms generally. See this article from The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, not known as a font of Vast Right-Wing Conspiracy thought.
/.

Well, maybe not overtly, but check this out:
http://www.bullatoms ci.org/issues/1994/nd94/nd94bulletins.html
http://dilbert.daily.umn. edu/daily/1995/10/03/news/spray/
Those friendly guys in our government lied to us. This is not the only case, I'm sure (and I got tired of trying to separate the wacko (my opinion) sites from the real ones in tracking down coverup info). If our government is willing to do things like this to us and lie about it, why should we believe anything they say about invading our privacy to catch terrorists, etc. Hell, for all I know they only set up this Echelon crap to get around the rules about spying on the public and they are gathering as much dirt on us as they can, just to have in case they want to mess with us. If it exists. :)



-beme

The US will use the escape clause to break the treaty, claiming that the situation of the US has changed since the signing of ABM in 1972. This is (to some extent) true, since in 1972, N. Korea, Iran/Iraq did not have ICBM technology. They still don't, but they are getting close. However, this is a foolish arguement, since there is absolutely no way any of those nations can develop a significant biological/nuclear arsenal capable of doing significant damage to the US. *One* of our Ohio-class nuclear ballistic missile submarines could easily annihilate the population centers of one of those countries. I think the leadership of those three countries (like many others) can be very foolish, but they are not suicidal.

Unfortunately, the US has not dealt with arms control issues very well under the current Clinton administration. The recent CTBT fiasco is a good example. In the case of CTBT, the US really should have a capability to remanufacture old weapons designs, which is what Russia does. In that case, there is no need to test - if you think an old weapon is no longer functioning, you simply build a new one based on the old design. Right now, the US cannot do that, at least without extreme difficulty (not to mention massive political fallout - pun intended).

FYI, current global active and hedge nuclear stockpile statistics are available from the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists

All treaties with the former USSR are still in effect. Treaty rights reverted to the CIS upon dissolution of the Soviet Union, and then to the Russian Federation. This is the same reason Russia now sits on the UN Security Council. The US will use the escape clause to break the treaty, claiming that the situation of the US has changed since the signing of ABM in 1972. This is (to some extent) true, since in 1972, N. Korea, Iran/Iraq did not have ICBM technology. They still don't, but they are getting close. However, this is a foolish arguement, since there is absolutely no way any of those nations can develop a significant biological/nuclear arsenal capable of doing significant damage to the US. *One* of our Ohio-class nuclear ballistic missile submarines could easily annihilate the population centers of one of those countries. I think the leadership of those three countries (like many others) can be very foolish, but they are not suicidal. Unfortunately, the US has not dealt with arms control issues very well under the current Clinton administration. The recent CTBT fiasco is a good example. In the case of CTBT, the US really should have a capability to remanufacture old weapons designs, which is what Russia does. In that case, there is no need to test - if you think an old weapon is no longer functioning, you simply build a new one based on the old design. Right now, the US cannot do that, at least without extreme difficulty (not to mention massive political fallout - pun intended). FYI, current global active and hedge nuclear stockpile statistics are available from the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists